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IMMORTAL CHRONICLES : BOOK TWO : beck dedrick

Beck Dedrick torment didn't end the day he returned from the dead. When the world was suddenly dark and void of anything, he lost one of the few things he fought to sustain—his control. He didn't have a voice to speak the first few days, and anything more than a single sentence scraped against his vocal cords, and pronounced the amount of blood pooling on his tongue. His lips were nothing but pebbles now, and as he devoured gallons of water against his stomach's will, they peeled away and remained chipped and bloody despite his best efforts.

But Beck endured it—partially by his own stubborn will, but mostly by Amara's fierce determination in reviving him for no good reason other than the purity of her soul. He learned to distaste her senseless tenacity. Any attempt she made to help him only seemed to sting him in a way only he could comprehend. She may not intentionally hurt him, but to be asked if he needed help with his food was beyond his realm of pride. He could hardly answer without sneering, but did so just to appease her.

Her voice was one of the few things he became well acquainted with after his illogical return to life. Even when he thought, This is hardly living, Amara seemed to be under the impression that whatever Beck happened to be at that moment, it was entirely pertinent. There was nothing wrong with him. He just couldn't see.

That first day she forced him away from his grave, he was too weak and greedy to consider pushing her aside and waiting until the hunger and dehydration got to him. He wouldn't have minded that death, if it wasn't so boring. He always expected his downfall to be something magnificent—by the violent hands of Vene Aminoff perhaps. She was a worthy opponent, and yet, she left him to die in the wilderness instead of the preferred route.

She left him to die.

Every day he snickered at the thought. She thought she killed him. Just the mere idea of tearing a knife down her trachea as he had done to her friend gave him a sort of thrill he hadn't felt since leaving his General in pursuit of Vene Aminoff. He may have failed his General there, and would certainly be useless in the state he was in now, but that didn't matter. To General Conroy, to Vene, to anyone else, Beck Dedrick was presumably dead. No one would suspect him to rise again.

Of course, this thought was hardly present in his mind the days following his revival. He felt like utter shit, as if someone had scraped the horse stalls with his face and dunked him in a vat of sand until he was forced to inhale the vile grains, and taste the blood of his own demise. He didn't want to admit it, but he never felt pain quite like this before.

He spent ages laying in a godforsaken bed that felt like sandpaper against his skin. It took days for that effect to wear off, and he was eternally grateful for that. It felt as though his skin boiled under the touch of any substance, and with that unfortunate side effect gone, Beck began to see.

It was faint at first, but he saw it just as well. The center of his vision took on a orange undertone, like some far off light caught in a fog. The hope that he wasn't permanently blind triggered his mind to conspire, to plot, and to picture the torture he would put Vene through for doing this to him. He didn't care how childish the concept of revenge was—he wanted it. He wanted it more than anything he ever yearned for before. He wanted it more than the ache in the core of his being when he started to hear Amara's voice as more than just a sardonic wish to be healthy again.

Amara disappeared on occasion. She spent hours away from his bedside, and at first he thought of it as a blessing until complications arose. He couldn't shit by himself worth a damn, and finding a cup of water was just as terrible. There were few things he could do without her assistance, especially when he didn't know his whereabouts. The first time she disappeared on him, he attempted to walk out of the room, and crashed straight into the corner of a wall. She found him collapsed on the floor, too weak to find his way back to the cot.

"Come on now, Beck, I've got you," Amara said to him, laying her hands on his bare skin. The contact sent his flesh rippling in agony, but he managed to reduce his cry of pain to a groan as she propped him back onto the cot. "You shouldn't be wandering on your own now. Let me take care of you."

At the time Beck was on the verge of spitting out, "You weren't fucking here—how the fuck else was I supposed to get a goddamn glass of water you bitch!" He would have, had his throat not been a complete mess and his mouth a festering pool of blood and torn skin and raw gums.

She often sat alongside Beck so his back rested against her shoulder and the mound of her chest, with an arm holding him still. She cleaned him this way, nursed him water this way, fed him this way, and at first it was infuriating. Beck loathed any contact with her—not just because it burned his skin, but he hated her for coddling him, like he reverted into a child during the time he spent decaying on the forest floor.

His body language did enough to put her off, and because she knew he initially abhorred her, he kept his sight improvement as far from her knowledge as he could. When she disappeared for hours on end, he'd practice by judging the shadows before him and finding the wall, the door, and out to a room filled with pure oranges and yellows, and white sunlight.

It was difficult navigating that new territory when the sunlight washed out the shadows and left him bumping into objects that were bathed in white. His legs constantly felt numb, which made stumbling easier than walking.

He spent most of his time alone trying to find an exit, but most of the light sources came from windows, which made finding the door outside difficult. He gathered that the cabin wasn't terribly large, so whenever he found a doorknob he expected it to lead outside. He found the restroom several times thinking he hadn't walked in a circle, and stumbled across a room he couldn't be sure was a bedroom or a study. He accidentally knocked over a stack of books, and haphazardly restacked them before leaving.

Eventually, though, he found the exit on a day that it was pouring rain. He could hear it drumming on the roof, and dripping against the windows. There was a porch that sheltered him from the blistering cold water, so he sat with his back against the wall until he heard Amara approaching, her boots sticky with mud and her clothes rustling with water.

"I see you've found a new favorite spot," she commented. "I'm glad you're moving around all right."

He cleared his throat and said, "I like to think that I'm exploring the world for the first time." His voice was rough and not his own, but to Amara it was. She let out a breathy laugh as she passed him, opening the door and leaving him to rest, content with the sounds of the rain above all else. It was better than silence.

On the day Beck's entire vision was a cloudy array of white blinding light and warm, muted tones, he went in search of his things. He scoured every corner of the room with the cot, and came up with nothing. He crawled on his hands and knees, patting around the floor, the tables, and any surface or drawers that might be holding his belt of weapons. It wasn't until he came up empty that he remembered, and remembered quite clearly how all of his weapons were confiscated the day of Ros' betrayal.

Damn her, he all but sneered, slamming his fist down on the floorboards. All of his weapons, his horse, his proper riding clothes were back in Ros' brothel where Vene's bout of torture conspired. He wondered if the stablehands completely abandoned Eton. His warhorse would fetch a decent price as well—perhaps they sold him to some stranger passing through Edinmar.

He had to go back there. He had to.

When he left the room and wandered to the front porch, he heard rustling beside the house, and a moment later, Amara's voice spoke up. She stepped into his line of vision as nothing but a faint, narrow blob of browns and blacks. "I see you're up. How do you feel?" she asked, mounting the steps and coming to stand directly in front of him. Her hands didn't feel like branding iron on his arms anymore.

"Fine," he answered.

"That's good to here," she said. "I have some camomile, if you'd like some tea for your throat. It might help soothe the pain."

He couldn't argue with that, so he nodded and let her pass him into the house. He braced a hand against the cabin siding and lowered himself onto the ground. His hand fell against something soft, and as he investigated, he found a cushion waiting for him. At first he didn't move to take it, but when Amara came out again, he was sitting on top of it.

The floorboards creaked as she knelt beside him, and slowly, found herself sitting with her back against the wall, and her shoulder pressed up against his. She picked up his hand, and he bristled under the calloused texture of her fingers. A mug was deposited into his hand, and it wasn't until he felt its warmth that he realized just how bitter cold the autumn air was.

Without a shirt, his flesh was open to Amara's touch, and the goosebumps she felt there. "I can't imagine it will be long before it snows," she said. "Right now there aren't any leaves on the trees. I just raked the yard earlier, so you won't find any there. I've just been drying some herbs for winter, pickling some vegetables. You know, the usual."

Her voice lilted and smoothed over into a whisper that vanished in the end, leaving only the sound of the wind coursing through, and shaking the tree branches over their heads. Beck's chest swelled with something incomprehensible.

"You never asked me how I ended up in the gorge," he said suddenly, lowering the mug to his lap. "Why?"

"I don't need an explanation," she said. "This is who you are now, and there's point dwelling on the past now, is there? You're here and you're alive, and that's all that matters."

His jaw ticked as he pictured himself slung uselessly over Vene's shoulder. Dropping him to the ground, and kicking him over the edge. He reached up and touched the tender spot on his head that often throbbed. There was no telling what he hit, but Amara stitched up that wound, and now there was the start of a bumpy scar on his hairline.

Her words cut him, and tore him to pieces. She views me as nothing more than my injuries, he scowled. His weakness was all this girl knew. She was ignorant. He was so much more than the state he was in now.

They spent the afternoon out on the porch. Amara brought out a blanket and wrapped it over his shoulders, and sat beside him with a book clasped between her hands. She read to him, and he felt like the child she thought he relapsed back to. On rare occasions Beck recalled the years spent in adolescent restlessness. He could only faintly recall his mother's hands stroking his hair, and with his vision so blurry, and his only knowledge of Amara being her voice, he wondered if she could be her.

There were few things Beck knew about the girl. He only knew her as she was then—living on her own in a cabin, out in the middle of the woods with no neighbors, no family or friends to count on. She sustained herself with wild herbs and medicines, and a garden she kept and scavenged from as the days grew colder. When Beck wasn't smelling the metallic stench of his bloody mouth, he smelled only sandalwood and the remnants of herbs on her hands. She tousled his hair frequently, and left the scent there so he smelled it on the pillow of his cot whenever he slept.

On one strange evening, after spending the day with Amara, he woke to the feeling of being elsewhere—he wasn't in her cabin anymore. His cot tumbled to the side, and he collapsed onto the floorboards in a panic, wondering if he was still paralyzed by a dream. There was a voice hissing from the doorway, yelling, "Don't hurt my son! He's a good kid—he didn't do anything wrong!"

He hadn't heard that voice in ages, and he cringed at the sound of it, folding his hands over his ears and wrenching his eyes shut. That voice wasn't supposed to be in existence anymore—he was dead.

The footsteps started towards him in a rampage. They were on him in an instant, and he felt a pair of hands jostling him, rousing him from his panic-induced reveries. "Dear gods, Beck, you fell from your bed." It was Amara. "Is your head all right? Did you bump it?"

She tugged at his arms so they fell from over his ears. He blinked past the mist that coated his eyes, and in a haze he saw the figure of Amara's face before him. Without eyes, or a nose, or a mouth that would define a human form. She was just the outline of a figure. She could be anyone—but that voice was unmistakable. Amara wasn't the man shouting in the doorway.

"It's fine. I'm fine," he said, fighting past the heaviness of his bones as he pulled his torso up from the ground. She held the cot steady for him as he lowered himself back down.

"Let me check your stitches," she said, and shuffled around in a drawer before coming back with the orange glow of a candle. With her thumb, she smoothed over the ridge of the thread, and pushed aside his hair. "I imagine we could take them out soon. Tomorrow morning when I'm not so bleary-eyed, hm? I wouldn't want to tear it all open again."

He nodded against the calloused texture of her fingers against his scalp. When she pulled away and left the room, Beck relaxed back on his cot and out a sheer force of will, managed not to satiate the sudden stress building up between his legs.